A couple of weeks ago, I cried in a therapy session. Not the quiet, contained tear that can still be folded into a professional nod. I mean cried. My client was reading me something she had written, and it struck me in a way I didn't anticipate. And underneath the emotion was another reaction entirely: This is so unprofessional. Pull it together. What would a supervisor say if they saw this?
Most of the time I no longer organize my work around those rules. And still, in that moment, the ghosts of professors, supervisors, consultants, and old versions of professionalism surfaced almost intact. They had been quiet for a long time. They were not gone.
This week's essay is about what we were taught to hide. When ethics is taught primarily through prohibition, we may not be teaching therapists how to practice ethically. We may be teaching them how to follow rules, and then how to feel shame when they find themselves outside them. Restraint can be an act of care. But somewhere along the way, restraint became confused with disappearance. The therapist doesn't stop being human because the session begins, so the question was never whether our humanity enters the room. It already has. The question is what we do with it once it's here.
Along the way: the questions I wish more clinicians were taught to ask in the moment; why the same disclosure can be deeply useful with one client and intrusive with another; why we can outgrow a rule intellectually long before our bodies stop bracing around it; and why "therapists are human too" can become its own excuse. Being genuine and being uncontained are not the same thing.
Read the essay and subscribe (free, one essay a week):
https://www.relationalthread.com/podcast?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=TRT_EssayNN_Therapists_Summer_2026
The Relational Thread grows from the forthcoming book EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread (2027) by Bridger Falkenstien & Jen Savage:
https://connectbeyondhealing.com/the-relational-thread/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=relational_thread
Notice That is an EMDR podcast for therapists, counselors, and social workers, hosted by Bridger Falkenstien and Jen Savage.
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